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The Great Divide

Longtime Bellerose institutions like the Frozen Cup are giving way to businesses selling Asian and South Asian art.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

THE Frozen Cup stand of Bellerose, Queens, which sits on Jericho Turnpike just east of the Cross Island Parkway, is painted the cheerful red and white of a candy cane. For nearly 70 years, the Frozen Cup served ice cream both soft and hard, and milkshakes, too.

Parents in this working- and middle-class neighborhood of tidy Cape and Tudor homes bordering Nassau County drove their children to the Frozen Cup after Little League games. In summer, families strolled the neighborhood’s streets, stopping at the ice cream stand for vanilla cones with extra chocolate sprinkles. Children sat with their cones on the curb, melted ice cream dripping onto little knees.

Angela and Michael Augugliaro live a few blocks away in a gray two-story house with a pool in the yard. She liked Frozen Cup’s hot fudge sundaes. He liked the pistachio shakes. Their daughters, now grown, used to walk there together, and one of the girls often ordered a mint chocolate chip hot fudge sundae with chocolate sprinkles.

“Death by chocolate,” Mr. Augugliaro, a retired sanitation worker, said of that concoction one recent Saturday afternoon as he and his wife sat on plump upholstered chairs in their living room and recalled those days.

In October, the Frozen Cup closed, its site having been bought for nearly $2 million by a group of hotel entrepreneurs. Unless another buyer comes along, the developers plan to build a Days Inn on the property; architectural plans are in progress and construction could start in the spring.

The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business.

There have been other changes, even more unsettling to some residents in this neighborhood, long a mostly white enclave of families of Irish, Italian and German stock.

In 1998, an old motorcycle shop on Braddock Avenue became a Sikh temple. Around the same time, grocery stores on Hillside Avenue began to sell basmati rice in 40-pound burlap sacks and a syrupy sweet pastry called gulab jamun. One new store sold statues of Hindu deities, and some longtime residents were baffled by the sight of a large elephant-headed figure with 10 arms in the front window.

The influx of immigrants from South Asia, lured by the same good schools and suburban-style living that attracted their predecessors, had begun in earnest by 1990. By one estimate, Asians, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, today make up nearly a third of the neighborhood’s population of about 20,000.

The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.

And many residents are not surprised that the developers who plan to tear down the Frozen Cup are Indian immigrants. Some of the same developers recently opened a Quality Inn down the road in Floral Park, an establishment, Mr. Augugliaro said, that “stands out like the Taj Mahal.”

While New York is often praised as a gorgeous mosaic, ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city, especially in neighborhoods that undergo rapid demographic shifts. Sometimes tensions are expressed overtly; other times, they lurk under the surface, revealing themselves in conversations that can be heard in local bars and living rooms.

That is the case in Bellerose.

Opponents of the planned Days Inn insist that their primary concern is not the race of the hotel entrepreneurs but the community’s quality of life. Still, many of what are seen as unwanted changes have arrived with the South Asian immigrants, a fact that invariably comes up in discussions about the fate of the Frozen Cup.

The Past vs. the Future

The Frozen Cup sits between a used-car lot and Raj Auto Center repair shop. Across the turnpike is Nassau County. A plastic vanilla cone, perched atop a pole by the roadside, still advertises the ice cream stand, though the Frozen Cup may be demolished any day now. Recently, its insides were mostly gutted but for items like an old cooler and a poster that read, “It Tastes Better in a Cone.”

When some Bellerose residents learned of the Frozen Cup’s likely demise, they protested loudly. They insisted it was a landmark, some noting with considerable pride that the Frozen Cup appeared in an episode of “Sex and the City,” when Carrie stopped there for a hamburger.

Photo

Harshad Patel, a developer of the hotel planned for the Frozen Cup site.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

The closing of the Frozen Cup was bad enough. But the plan to build a 44-room hotel, for which construction is tentatively scheduled to begin in the spring, salts local wounds. Some residents worry about the possibility that the hotel will be used by prostitutes, often a local concern when new hotels arrive in Queens. And if the hotel falls victim to the ailing economy, many residents fear that welfare recipients would move in.

On Dec. 15, one of the hotel developers, Mitesh Patel, told several dozen residents at a community board meeting at the Bellerose Assembly of God Church that he and his partners aimed to create a reputable hotel, not a “hot sheets” establishment. And he told them that he and his family lived in the community.

But some in the crowd were skeptical.

“They’re renting their rooms to people from their country,” one man said, according to an article in The Jamaica Times, a local newspaper that covered the event. “You’re changing our whole way of life, our whole neighborhood,” the man reportedly said to Mr. Patel.

Shortly after the meeting, one of Mitesh Patel’s business partners, Harshad Patel (no relation), talked about local antagonism toward the hotel and its developers.

“It’s a kind of jealousy,” Harshad Patel said from an office at a Days Inn on Queens Boulevard, one of several hotels of which he is a part owner. A few good-luck $20 bills were tacked to the wall, next to a small image of a Hindu goddess.

“They feel we are coming from out of country,” he added, “and we move forward, and they don’t.”

Harshad Patel, who lives with his family in Floral Park, immigrated to the United States in 1981. Before entering the hotel business, he worked as a restaurateur, a metal lathe operator, a water plant operator and a sewage treatment worker. He also ran an electroplating business.

He said he was perplexed by the veneration of the Frozen Cup.

“If they have so much feeling,” he said of the establishment’s devotees, “let them buy it. Let them run the Frozen Cup if they want to.”

But the business would not survive, he insisted. “Nowadays,” Mr. Patel said, “there are so many flavors on the market and so many places to go.”

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To drive home his point, he made a public offer. If someone wanted to run the Frozen Cup for the next 10 years, he promised to sell the place at a $100,000 loss.

“Let me see,” he said with a grin. “Who is coming forward?”

Turbans, Mansions

As officers of the Queens Colony Civic Association and members of other community groups, Angela and Michael Augugliaro have been among the most vocal opponents of the plan to replace the Frozen Cup with a hotel.

But as they sat in their living room, they expressed unhappiness with what they see as other undesirable changes in the neighborhood: street vendors selling halal gyros; traffic congestion near the Indian and Pakistani grocery stores on Hillside Avenue; newly created mini-mansions, many of them occupied by extended South Asian families.

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

The couple later recalled a morning years ago when they saw an old man in an orange turban walking on the sidewalk with a curved sword slung from his waist like the one they remembered from the Ali Baba cartoons.

Photo

Unwinding at Fuzzys Bar, An icon of old Bellerose, top right; John Dolan, top right, at the local V.F.W. post; Sikh youths, bottom left; women eating after prayer at Gurdwara Sant Sagar, next door to the V.F.W. post.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The man was a Sikh, and the object was a Kirpan, a sword carrying religious symbolism and worn by some adherents of the faith, though often a smaller version of the Kirpan is worn on a necklace under a shirt. The couple laughed as they recalled the scene.

“It was like a total shock,” Ms. Augugliaro said.

Tales Told at the Bar

Many of the South Asians who live in Bellerose have only good things to say about the neighborhood. On a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Francis Thomas, the Indian-born owner of India Kitchen, a restaurant on Braddock Avenue, stood at the counter and said relations between the races in Bellerose were good. “They’re tolerant,” Mr. Thomas said of the people of Bellerose.

Next door to the India Kitchen, however, at a pub called Fuzzy’s Bar, where a grill called Wolf Dawg serves burgers and “hot dawgs,” patrons griped about their immigrant neighbors as “Jeopardy!” played on two small television sets.

“Everybody wants to bring their country here,” said Bruce Holloway, one patron who lives in Bayside, Queens. “They don’t want to look like Americans, they don’t want to dress like Americans, and they don’t want to speak English.”

“But they do come for the benefits,” volunteered his drinking buddy, who gave his name as Franco and said he grew up in Bellerose and used to go to the Frozen Cup for strawberry ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. And of the South Asian grocery stores, he added, one of which opened a month earlier down the block and had the word “bazaar” in its name, “It’s not the kind of store an American goes into.”

Of the newcomers, a group he describes simply as “the Indians,” he said, “They change everything that’s been here.” And he wondered aloud, “Where the hell do they get the money from?”

A few nights later, inside a nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars post that features a camouflaged armored personnel carrier in its front yard, some sentiments expressed by the patrons at the bar were much the same. But one younger member of the group didn’t entirely agree.

John Dolan, 23, recently completed a four-year stint on active duty in the Navy, some of it off Iraq. His family used to go to the Frozen Cup, he recalled as he sipped beer from a plastic cup; and, in fact, his mother stopped there for a vanilla cone when she was in labor with his older brother. (“Ice cream always calms you down,” she explained.)

When Mr. Dolan was a boy, one of his friends knew the number of the pay phone on the street near the Frozen Cup. They used to call the number, and to their surprise, girls sometimes answered. Some of his friends in those days had names like Nashad, a common South Asian name.

“We didn’t really care who was who,” Mr. Dolan said. “We were just trying to have a good time.”

‘New Kids on the Block’

Next door to the V.F.W. post stands Gurdwara Sant Sagar, a Sikh temple where Monday, Jan. 26, was an important day. That afternoon, men with long white beards and wearing white and purple turbans chanted in Punjabi before a congregation of several dozen worshipers. They were commemorating the birthday of Baba Deep Singh, a historic figure venerated by Sikhs as a martyr.

After the ceremony, a vegetarian meal was served on plastic foam plates, and members of the congregation sat cross-legged on the maroon carpet eating dhal and roti. Among the crowd was Swaranjit Singh, a 55-year-old real estate broker who is running for the City Council.

“We are the new kids on the block,” Mr. Singh said after the meal, over the sound of workmen hammering on the other side of a drywall partition to expand the space in the temple.

Mr. Singh predicted that the 2010 census would show that nearly 40 percent of the population of District 23, which includes his neighborhood of Bellerose and several surrounding communities, was of South Asian ancestry. If he could unite voters of South Asian ancestry, or, as he referred to them, “roti-eating people,” and get them to turn out at the polls, he predicted, he would unseat Councilman David Weprin in September’s Democratic primary.

“Pizza-eating people have representation,” Mr. Singh said. “Burger-eating people have representation. Bagel-eating people have representation. But roti has no representation.”

Then the candidate headed off in his black Lexus to his campaign office on Union Turnpike, passing an Italian ice stand where he and his wife sometimes stop during evening strolls in the summer. Mr. Singh likes the watermelon ices there the best. He had never been to the Frozen Cup.

In the window of his office was a campaign poster showing him with a graying beard, pointy mustache and red turban, the image set against the stars of the American flag. The candidate smiled contentedly at his prospects for victory. “You know” he said, “one of my people said to me, ‘Here comes our Obama.’ ”